Saturday, December 30, 2006

2007 will be a special year for me, one with some significant milestones happening. For one, I will turn 30 in 2007. Also, I may get into a graduate school, and hence do a relocation, in 2007.

To commemorate this special year, I bought myself an Oris Flight Timer 2 a few days ago. The second time zone feature will be useful when I start the PhD program, I told my wife. We need to keep track of the home time so that we don't make calls back at unearthly hours.

Yes, I'm jumping the gun with all the talks about the "special year", "significant milestones", and "useful second time zone" - but hey, I do need to give some justifications for the purchase.

Friday, December 22, 2006

I should be submitting the research paper that I'm co-authoring to another journal within the next few days. It is good to get this done before the year-end.

I have been working on this piece for the last 9 months or so. Yes, it is taking a bit longer than it should. This is because I was quite tied up with work and the schools' applications, especially in the last 2 to 3 months.

This research is more of a qualitative, cased-based paper. Although I think I will be doing more quant-based research (should I be admitted to the schools that I am applying), the experience of writing this paper has been very enriching. It helps tohone my analytical and writing skills, as well as exposes me slightly to the submission requirements and processes.

I hope it will be accepted for review/publishing this time round (which researcherwould hope otherwise for her work?). I don't think it will be in time to affect my applications, nevertheless it would be a nice closure and maybe something that I can talk about should some of the schools decide to interview me.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

I was hoping for one or two early admits from some schools for this Christmas. Well, I guess the ad comms are not reading my blog.... Anyway, I have just completed a new draft of the research paper that I'm working on with a prof. Hope to submit it for pub soon. I was a little busy lately these few months and have sort of taken my eyes off it. I'm really glad that I could sit down and work on it over the last few days. I look forward to it being published somewhere, although I don't think this will have any material impact on my applications for the PhD program.

I'm left with one last application. I'm targeting to send it out by 10 Jan before a holiday trip that I will be making with my wife and daughter. Good to have something to take my mind off the waiting....

Sunday, December 03, 2006

It's December, and one of the schools' application deadline is approaching. I have already completed and submitted my application for this school weeks ago, and so I'm cool (or pretending to be cool) about it. Anyway, the school already sent me an automated email to tell me that I will only hear of the decision by March/April next year.

Anyway, two outstanding tasks that I have (as of now) is to complete the application for one more school as well as my research project. For the former, there are about 3 months to the deadline, so it can wait a while more. For the latter, I have procrastinated for about 2 months - I hope to get it done before Christmas.

Once these are done, I would like to write in details of my experiences in the application process, e.g. the statement of purpose, letter of recommendations, etc.. I hope this would benefit future applicants. If I get admitted, then they would be positive advices. Otherwise, they would be negative examples - negative but useful nevertheless, I'm sure.